REPORT BLASTS U.S. INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY

WASHINGTON -- More than three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies remain poorly coordinated, have resisted reform and produce work that is "increasingly irrelevant," a presidential commission concluded Thursday in a scathing new report.

Despite vast increases in funding and manpower after 2001, America's 15 intelligence services were "dead wrong" about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and still "are often unable to gather intelligence on the very things we care the most about," the blue-ribbon panel warned.

"Across the board, the intelligence community knows disturbingly little about the nuclear programs of many of the world's most dangerous actors," the nine-member panel concluded after a yearlong inquiry. "In some cases, it knows less now than it did five or 10 years ago."

The withering critique of America's spy services, delivered Thursday to President Bush, provided vivid new details about the intelligence debacle before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The 601 pages of unclassified material released to the public hinted that similar problems of inadequate collection and shoddy analysis also may undermine U.S. assessments of nuclear programs and regime intentions in Iran and North Korea. But those details were classified and panel members refused to discuss them.

The report is the latest in a series of harsh, high-level critiques of U.S. intelligence since Sept. 11. But it is the first to conclude that the CIA and other U.S. agencies have failed to adequately respond to back-to-back failures on al-Qaeda and Iraq -- and to highlight glaring shortcomings in the war on terrorism.

Despite what the report calls clear signals from Bush to coordinate agency efforts, for example, the panel finds a "turf battle raged" for over a year between the CIA Counterterrorist Center and the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which was created after Sept. 11 to better coordinate the government's counterterrorism intelligence and operations.

The commission warned that "the war between agencies that are tasked to fight the war on terror will continue" unless John Negroponte, the president's nominee for the newly created position of director of national intelligence, can resolve the bitter dispute.

The report thus puts new pressure on Bush, who has held office during two of the worst intelligence fiascos in modern U.S. history and who has struggled, along with Congress, to reform the sprawling, $40 billion-a-year intelligence system.

The latest assault on CIA credibility also may hinder Washington's efforts to convince skeptical governments that despite Tehran's denials, Iran is secretly pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.

The panel is formally known as the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction. Bush accepted its report from the co-chairmen, Laurence Silberman, a senior federal judge, and former U.S. Sen. Charles Robb, D-Va., in the Executive Office Building.

"The central conclusion is one that I share: America's intelligence community needs fundamental change," Bush told reporters.

Bush promised "concrete action" on the panel's 74 recommendations, many of which can be implemented without congressional approval. "To win the war on terror, we will correct what needs to be fixed," he said.

Fran Townsend, the White House homeland-security adviser, told reporters later Thursday that the review and implementation process would be completed within 90 days. "You will begin to see action in a matter of weeks," she said.

The proposals include an array of organizational changes designed to increase information sharing and reduce bitter bureaucratic wrangling among the CIA, FBI, Pentagon and other intelligence-gathering agencies.

The panel urged the CIA to create a new human-intelligence directorate to oversee the clandestine service, the 1,200 or so spies that the CIA employs, and to coordinate with other U.S. agencies -- principally the FBI and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency -- that increasingly conduct espionage operations overseas.

Some of the report's most scathing material is about more recent problems in the war on terrorism. In particular, the report exposed a raging conflict between two agencies that are supposed to spot emerging threats and lead the U.S. response.

The National Counterterrorism Center was created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to serve as the nation's clearinghouse for threat data and to prevent the breakdowns in intelligence sharing that plagued the nation in the summer of 2001.

But the new center and an older counterpart, the CIA's counterterrorism center, "continue to fight bureaucratic battles to define their place in the war on terror," the report said.

Bush created the commission early last year after chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay warned Congress that prewar intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction was "almost all wrong."

No such weapons were ever found, and the CIA's Iraq Survey Group concluded last October that the former Iraqi dictator had secretly abandoned his chemical-, biological- and nuclear-weapons programs more than a decade ago.

The new commission is more emphatic. U.S. intelligence "was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments" about Iraq's illicit weapons, panel members wrote in a letter to the president summarizing their findings. "This was a major intelligence failure."